FREE THE NIPPLE!!!
Patronized by the mighty Heinz Guderian
As stated before, DA:O worked since it was a character driven story and the game had a cast of good characters that held it up. It had a good main hero who was way better then Hawke and even Shepard. He/she wad good since he/she was what we wanted it to be, achieved by giving us the choices so we can connect to it much better. Much like Baldur Gate, the more choices you are given the more "our" character it is. Hawke and even Shepard to some extent never felt like my character.
DA:O had a better villain as well. The Darkspawn felt like a major threat and Loghain was well-written.
The side characters were diverse and enjoyable.
DA2 having a better story is something I strongly disagree with. I can agree with that the premise of the story was better but the execution of it was terrible.
Give me a cliche but well executed story any day of the year over the crap that was DA2.
So in other words, Bioware has gotten lazy so let's just excuse them for it.
And funny you mentioned economics since DA:O took around 5 years to make and sold really well due to the quality of the game. DA2 took way less time to make and it didn't sell as well.
Morale of the story, if you want to make a RPG that sells well, you take the time and the money it takes and it will come back to you.
Dragon age franchise is already on thin ice due to DA2, Bioware can't really afford to make mistakes when it comes to this and it's sad that they are already starting to mistakes with DA3 this early in, just like they did with DA2 funny enough.
Can we go back to having a silent protagonist? I find the experience to honestly be better because there is 0 chance of them having a crappy VA or speaking a line poorly and ruining entire scenes or moments for me.
There are lines in DA:O that actually made me pretty damn emotional and your character doesn't ever speak other than a few witty battle/death lines.
Patronized by the mighty Heinz Guderian
Yeah I agree. What really sucks with a talking protagonist is that it's common that he says something completely different then from the choice you picked("I want to be a dragon" becomes "Nice trick")Bioware has done this in 5 games now and they still screw it up and it takes away alot from the game more then it adds.
DA:O never had this problem since Bioware atleast knows how to do the responses so it flows so much better with a silent protagonist.
Silent protagionist would be preferable, even better would be the choice between multible voice actors. Even Saint's Row 2 and 3 have a fully voiced protagionist with 3 different voices for each gender. And considering the amount of spoken dialogue in the old republic, they dont have an excuse anymore to be cheap with voice acting.
Most important part of course is being able to create your own character instead of being stuck with whatever moron they want to assign to you. Thats the point of an RPG after all, being able to create your own character.
I would be very disappointed if in 2013 we're going to not have a fully voiced protagonist. Honestly it was one of my numerous disappointments when I played DAO.
Considering the amount of money Bioware brings in and, even though EA is hemmoraging money, they're still the "big name" publisher. They should be able to fun multiple voice tracks. You know, I mean you know a game is going to do that sooner rather than later, why not be the first ones to do it. Beat everybody to the punch?
Hawke was just so... boring. Like, the confrontation with Carver in the beginning, it had all the makings to be tense and dramatic and make you get an emotional responce, but, the line reading for both Genders was just so flat for every option that there was never the feeling of emotion behind what Hawke was saying. I loved SR2 because it had 6 different voice tracks that were actually different, the lines were varied.
But I just want my silent protagonist so I can actually, you know, role play in an RPG. If I want to be a smarmy jackass, I'll be a smarmy jackass, but I don't want to be deadpan the entire time I'm being a smarmy jackass. That defeats the point.
Patronized by the mighty Heinz Guderian
That means get better voice actors, not have an unvoiced character.
Only me who despised the "witty" or "funny" resorts hawke told?
You have a certain mentality, a "you vs them" and i know it is hard to see, but it is only your imagination which makes up enemies everywhere. I haven't professed anything but being neutral so why Do you feel the need to defend yourself from me?. Truly What are you defending? when there is nobody attacking?
The problem is that Hawke is British and therefore can't be too funny, while Shepard, as an American, was more enjoyable.
Was it? I never felt like they were my characters, rather that I was simply choosing answers based on whether I was doing a good/neutral/evil playthrough. Contrast with Geralt from The Witcher who is a vastly more established character but I felt that I actually had a choice in his actions rather than just choosing a prescribed morality run.
Some day I'll actually write all the reviews I keep promising...
don't agree with this in any shape or form. Final Fantasy sets the benchmark on just about every game they release, and they have always had already created characters in their games. Okay, DA2 is a very different game to a ff game. But still you get my point. You only have to look at the enduring popularity of yuna/tidus, cloud/tifa and much more recently lightning (who personally i hated) to prove that rpg games don't need creatable characters. In fact rpg games are by default stories. And thus becomes a choice between 'the story of x character' or 'the story of y world with you in it'. (skyrim would be a good choice to show the later, or DAO) Writing the story of x character in y world (as i think they did with DA2) becomes overly complicated writing and can easily fail to connect with the players.
The issue with DA2 for me, was its a good story, but the reusing of enviroments (which could have worked if they had limited it to just a couple of places, say the dalish camp and kirkwall. Rather than doing it absolutely everwhere!), the ending making the rest of the game pointless (i can support the mages the entire game despite them almost all using blood magic then have to fight both the templers and the head mage, or i can support the templers the entire game, punish the bad mages, then have to fight the templers who go insane and the head mage) and the silly writing concerning most of the companions. I mean really, who takes ten years to ask someone out? And thats just one obvious example of how the time span idea was implemented in a silly way. You also had the problem of the last chapter, again poor writing rather than a bad idea. You spend the entire game hearing about the Quanari, while only passingly hearing about the mage/templer disagreement. Only to drive off the interesting guys in the second chapter and have to face the templers/mages. Its even worse if you never did any of the anders stuff, cause its only though anders that you get some sort of feel for the mage/ templers tensions.
Never felt that DA:O was about good, evil or neutral.
Main reason is that I dislike playing evil and didn't have a problem doing the more bad things in Origin. Maybe it was because the "evil" things were better justified then in most games where you are either a angel or a baby-eating monster. The Warden was never a evil character no matter what it did. No doubt a testiment to the good writing.
The thing with Geralt IMO is that he was well written but for me, I care him about as much as I care for the protagonist in a movie. Can never really get immersed since well it's not my character.
The Warden was my character, I was given various options to decide origin, race, class and looks and that was it. He/she didn't need a voice since it was with my voice they spoke with.
It's the DnD way which is really the best format for a RPG. It's still a journey from A to B but it's my journey.
I don't think it is a problem directly linked to the voiced protagonist. The Witcher didn't experiment this problem anywhere near the same scale. At worst two different words in a dialogue with the sentences been the same in the French version.
No for me it is caused by the "wheel of doom" as it doesn't offer sufficient place for the dialogue.
It is sad to see 5 games with the same problem that could be easily solved because of their "artistic integrity".
For what I have seen a more recent problem is the protagonist talking with the consent of the player. It was something that surprised me in the few extract I have seen in ME3 (didn't played the game) and something that is concerning for what is supposed to be an RPG game.
WUt you just say? it doesnst make any sense at all. There is funny people, and there isnt funny people. Nothing to do with nationality. I dont find Shepard male voice enjoyable at all, but very boring actualy. I do like Female shepard voice though. Jennifer Hale after all
Last edited by Knight of Heaven; October 24, 2012 at 12:55 PM.
Can't agree with this more. In Origins, I'd have several different lines of text to choose from that even with some having the same effect made me feel like I was shaping my character more. With Hawke, it was pick one of about three responses and half the time you'd end up saying something I totally didn't intend or think would happen!
I think the main reason the Witcher works is that Geralt is a fairly well defined character. You don't really shape his personality, you just pick the big decisions. Coupled with Geralt being a likeable character means it works well. Dragon Age on the other hand is built around shaping your character and the voiced protagonist just takes too much control away from the player.
Give a man a fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of the day.
Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.